Aslan, Netflix, and the Unforced Error

Last week Empire put Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew on its November cover, and with it Netflix confirmed a rumor that had been going around since the spring of 2025: Meryl Streep will voice Aslan. The film opens in IMAX on February 12, 2027, and comes to Netflix on April 2. Gerwig said the list of candidates "is not a long one." She wanted someone "profound but not pretentious," with "gravitas but not morose self-seriousness," someone "older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience," and "one of the greatest actors to ever do it."

Every item on that list is a fair thing to want from the voice of Aslan. One thing that many hoped wouldn't need to be included on that list is that Aslan is male. In the film he still is one; the production calls Aslan "he." So what Netflix has made is an objectively male lion speaking with an objectively female voice, in the one Narnia book where the lion's voice makes the world.

What Lewis Wrote

Aslan is often described as a metaphor for Jesus, or an allegory of him. Lewis rejected both words. In a 1958 letter to a reader named Mrs. Hook, he called Aslan "an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?'" His term for it was a supposal. Aslan is a re-presentation of Jesus in another medium: the Son of God, supposing he had taken a lion's nature in Narnia the way he took a man's nature in Judea.

The connection is never explicit within the books, but the closest Lewis comes is metaphorically tipping his hat. At the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan tells Edmund and Lucy that in their world "I have another name," and that they were brought to Narnia "that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." Lewis did not pick the lion at random either. Revelation 5:5 calls Christ "the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David." When Lewis set Christ in a world of talking beasts, Scripture had already chosen the animal for him.

Aslan's maleness belongs to the supposal, and Lewis addressed this exact question in print. In his 1948 essay "Priestesses in the Church?" he walked through what would follow if Christians began treating the sex of the divine images as interchangeable: "Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son." If those supposals were ever carried into effect, he wrote, "we should be embarked on a different religion." He published that two years before the first Narnia book came out.

The Voice in The Magician's Nephew

While there's no good place for this decision, of the seven books, The Magician's Nephew is the worst place to make this change. It is the creation story. Aslan sings Narnia into existence: the stars, the sun, the grass, and finally the animals rise out of the ground in answer to his song. Digory, Polly, the cabby, Uncle Andrew, and Jadis stand in the dark and listen to a world being made by a voice. For the most important scene in the book, the voice carries the character.

Christian readers hear Genesis 1:3 and John 1:1-3 under that chapter: God speaks, and it is so, and all things are made through the Word. Lewis wrote the scene so a child could hear it that way, and Christian parents have read it aloud to their children for seventy years for that reason.

There's a lot that could happen here with Streep. Will Aslan sound feminine? Maybe not. Character voices are edited often, and it's possible that maybe they will change the voice to be more masculine. If they do make a change like this, I think that would just raise the question all over again: why cast Streep at all in this role?

If they leave the femininity of her voice, that would be thematically worse: a woman's voice on that song changes what a child hears at the moment Lewis most wanted them to hear the voice of the Son.

Good Will Toward the Book

It is very hard to see this casting as good will toward Lewis's work or toward the people who love it. Gerwig is a serious director and Streep is a serious actor, and neither of them needed this role to prove anything. Gerwig's hiring even from the outset was a bit of a head scratcher, with Barbie not exactly being synonymous with Christian literature. But, in the last seven or so years, it's hard to escape the obvious feeling: a female Aslan was a deliberate choice, made against the text, for a character the author tied directly to the incarnate Son of God.

It also smacks of identity pandering, and once a casting decision reads that way, nobody can judge it as a performance anymore. Streep may be amazing in the role. I doubt it, but she may be. Every review, every trailer, and every conversation about the film between now and February and beyond will be about the casting, and the performance will never get a fair hearing inside the movie.

Hollywood Has Tried This Before

Hollywood has run this experiment several times in the last few years. Disney's live-action Snow White spent its entire publicity cycle defending its casting of Rachel Zegler, a person with an absolutely outstanding voice who did not embody the culture of the story, and Disney lost money as a result. To be fair, it also didn't help that Zegler seemed to enjoy insulting paying customers at every opportunity. You could also hear the bean-counters screaming every time she had to do an interview.

The Little Mermaid was argued over for four years before it opened and underperformed overseas. The movie wasn't nearly the flop that Snow White turned out to be, but you'll have a hard time convincing anyone that its deliberate choices to subvert the culture of Hans Christian Andersen helped. Their casting of Halle Bailey (another incredibly talented voice) was intentionally divisive.

HBO's Harry Potter series cast Paapa Essiedu, a Black actor, as Severus Snape, and the argument over that choice has followed the show since the announcement. Given the flashbacks bound to happen in the later books, this is going to create some very awkward dimensions not present in their original medium. Those who know, know what I mean... These choices are deliberate.

In each case a studio took a property with an established audience, changed a part of the story that audience cared about, and then treated the audience's objection as the problem. Where the films have come out, large parts of that audience stayed home. Some of those films may have had other faults, but there is one issue that sucks the oxygen out of the room, and we are worse as a society for it.

The audience is not the enemy for noticing the studios' deliberately chosen patterns.

Who Buys the Ticket

The core audience for a Narnia film is evangelical Christians and their children. It has been since the 2005 Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which churches promoted from the pulpit, bought out screenings for, and built Sunday school series around. Back then, Disney and Walden Media hired Motive Marketing, the firm that ran the church outreach for The Passion of the Christ. Motive Marketing knew what to bank on.

Further, if one group in this country has been rock solid against identity politics, it is this one. They are not going to appreciate a female-voiced Aslan, and many of them will take the casting the way I do: as a signal that the book they love is in the hands of people who do not share their love for it.

The secular audience is not going to care about this project the way the evangelical community does. A general audience may put a fantasy film on Netflix on a Friday night, but nobody outside the church was going to plan around an adaptation of The Magician's Nephew the way Christian families would have. Netflix has traded the enthusiasm of the people who were already coming for the approval of people who were unlikely to show up in numbers.

An Unforced Error

In tennis, an unforced error is a point lost on a shot the player had every chance to make. Nothing in the book, the market, or the story required this casting. Plenty of men over seventy have the voice for the part.

Netflix had the most reliable audience in the business for this property, seven books that talk about this lion, thousands if not millions of Sunday school lessons, sermons, and essays to pull from. All of them told them exactly who Aslan is and they went out of their way to get it wrong.

It is hard to think of this casting as anything other than extreme pandering to an uninterested audience at best, and full-on bad will toward the core audience at worst. Sadly, this reeks of bad will.

I have read every single book Lewis ever published. I've read every letter from his Collected Letters. I've read every essay he wrote. I've researched his debate with Anscombe. I teach from The Discarded Image in my history class, and I used to teach all seven books of Narnia to middle schoolers. C.S. Lewis was, for me, the beginning of adult thinking.

I won't be watching The Magician's Nephew.

God bless, everyone.